Faculty

Hengyi Rao, PhD
Research Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging in Neurology and Psychiatry,
Division of Sleep and Chronobiology, Center for Functional Neuroimaging,
Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine

Hengyi Rao, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging in Neurology and Psychiatry in the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Rao received his degree in Biophysics and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Science and Technology of China. Dr. Rao was trained at Beijing Laboratory of Cognitive Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and has been worked as a lecturer in the Department of Psychology, Sun Yat-Sen University in China until 2004 before moving to the United States. Dr. Rao was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Center for Functional Neuroimaging at University of Pennsylvania from 2004-2007.

It is the prospects of functional brain research to understand the nature of humanity and improve human life and health that attract Dr. Rao to select his career. Dr. Rao's research investigates the neurobiological basis underlying human cognition, emotion and behavior. He is skilled in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and cognitive neuroscience, and is interested in integrating multiple neuroimaging and electrophysiological research techniques (primarily ASL perfusion fMRI and BOLD fMRI, also including EEG/ERP, PET, tDCS, and TMS) with behavioral paradigms and genomic methods to understand human brain function. He has recently conducted and published several studies by the combination of fMRI and EEG/ERP, fMRI and structural MRI, fMRI and genotype, concurrent perfusion and BOLD fMRI, concurrent fMRI and PET. Dr. Rao is applying his expert in functional brain imaging for sleep research. Specifically, he is interested in the neurobiological basis of sleep, the effect of sleep on learning and memory, and the effect of sleep deprivation on human cognition, emotion and behavior. He is particularly interested in the neural bases underlying inter-individual differences in human risk-taking and decision-making and the vulnerability to addiction, mood disorders, sleep loss, and fatigue.

Dr. Rao's research has been supported by NHLBI and NIDA. He is currently the Principal Investigator of a 5-year NHLBI grant investigating the neural basis for differential vulnerability to sleep deprivation and a one-year NIDA grant investigating the impaired risk taking behavior and neural activity in cocaine dependent patients. He is also the Principal Investigator of a Translational Biomedical Imaging Center (TBIC) collaborative pilot grant to investigate human brain function changes across sleep/wake cycle with concurrent EEG and fMRI. Dr. Rao is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), the Society for Neuroscience (SFN), the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine (ISMRM), the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM), and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS). He serves as the reviewer for many journals in neuroimaging, neurology, and psychiatry, and for funding applications to NIH and Chinese National Science Foundation.